GPUs Win the Day at ASC14 Student Cluster Competition

Over at the Nvidia Blog, George Middleton writes that GPUs once-again powered the winning team at the recent ASC14 Student Cluster Competition in China. Nvidia seems to be on a roll here, as this is the seventh time in a row that a GPU based system powered the winning team in a student cluster competition.

Pictured here, the team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) took the top spot in the largest student supercomputer challenge, ASC14, held last month. At the same time, the top three teams all relied on NVIDIA GPUs.

And the new NVIDIA K40 GPUs helped China’s Sun Yat-sen University set a new record. The team got a record 9.27 teraflops on the HPC industry standard Linpack performance benchmark. The previous record: 8.45 teraflops.

Armed with a student-built cluster powered by eight NVIDIA K20 GPU accelerators, SJTU earned the highest total score for performance on six tests. These included runs on the elastic wave modeling application, 3D-EW; a run on quantum chemistry application, Quantum ESPRESSO; and other real-world scientific codes.

We need to educate new legions of students in high-performance computing,” said James Lin, vice director Center for HPC at SJTU. “Teaching HPC skills in a competition like this can be more effective than in a classroom. In fact, as a result of his experience, one of our team members decided to focus on an HPC PhD at Virginia Tech.”

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team splits on the topic of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon publish its new rules for ensuring an even playing field for Internet Bandwidth. "Dan doesn't like the idea one bit. Henry disagrees and thinks we need Net Neutrality to keep the Comcasts of the world from running amok. As for Rich, he just finds the whole argument rather amusing since it's pretty much a done deal." [Read More...]